Around a week before she left the spinal unit, Cresswell attended the Spinal Games at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which is for patients with spinal injuries who are either still in hospital or within a year post-accident, and is an opportunity to try different sports over four days.
You name it, she tried it.
“I got six out of six bull’s eyes and won the archery out of 110 people,” she says.
“It was a great stepping stone to coming home. And I think I kind of held on to that when I came home initially because the first while was really tough at home.”
She left hospital on 8 October and by December had started wheelchair racing, going on to race 10Ks and a half-marathon, also doing wheelchair tennis and basketball.
The trouble was, she didn’t love them.
“I was worried I would never find a sport that I wanted to put my whole energy into,” she says. “I think I knew that horses were my hobby that got to turn into my sport and my career and lifestyle so I didn’t know if that would be possible to find something like that.”
Enter para-canoe.
Cresswell had got chatting to Olympic canoe athlete Deborah Kerr at an event run by the Women’s Sport Trust charity who had told her to “have a go”.
So, on 23 December last year, she did. Winter was “not the time to start a water sport” and she was “not a natural”.
“My coach was too scared to let me off the bank in case I capsized,” she laughs. “And that probably stayed, I don’t think I left the bank for about a month.”
A one-off taster session turned into twice a week and then eventually five times a week on the water. Four-hour training sessions, plus gym work three days a week.
One of the biggest challenges has been staying upright.
“I don’t have any feedback of any part of my body if I am losing balance,” she explains. “So I’m strapped into a seat because I’ve got no core function, but I can’t actually feel that seat. So I basically feel like I’m floating.
“So my only thing I’ve got to know if I’ve lost balance is my head and my eyes. So that took a while to start to hone in and they always say, deaf people hear better than anybody else, don’t they? And I think it’s a bit the same.
“It’s like, I’ve now tuned into how to balance myself without the use of the rest of my body. But I’d say the balance aspect is a big part of it alongside the technical, constant skill-based stuff that needs to be improved.”
It is the technical aspect that she thinks has similarities to equestrian and which is why she thinks she enjoys it so much.
Her progress has been rapid, by anyone’s standards. Not least her own.
“World Championships was definitely not the plan. It was a quiet goal after a while that if I could get the time, I might be able to go,” says Cresswell, who alongside training is also doing media work.
“The time I needed to achieve was, I think, one minute 26 seconds. And anyway, I’m now down to one minute 18. So I’ve kind of over-achieved on that one, which has just been through repetition, practise, finding new ways to do things.”
She has been selected to represent Great Britain at this month’s Canoe Sprint and Para-Canoe World Championships in Poznan, Poland.
Having only ever raced once before in the UK her aims are modest.
“Honestly, stay up and get through the start and finish line,” she says, explaining that she capsized before the start of a race she was due to do in April.
It is more about getting an international classification – which involves a series of medical tests to assess an athlete’s impairment and demonstrating how much of your body you can use when paddling – so that she can be eligible to earn points at events that can lead to qualification for the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles.
Could she have pictured this when she was in hospital?
“I certainly wouldn’t have imagined I was going to do para-canoe – I didn’t even know [that] was a sport when I was in hospital,” says Cresswell, who will compete in the VL1 (a canoe with a support float) and KL1 (kayak).
“But to be honest, I think what actually is more kind of crazy in my head is I couldn’t even imagine January me doing this.”
